Research Program

Research Interest

Dr. Kinghorn has worked for about 30 years on the discovery of new anticancer agents from mainly tropical plants. For over a decade while at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Dr. Kinghorn served as Principal Investigator of a National Cooperative Drug Discovery Groups (NCDDG) project entitled "Novel Strategies for Plant-Derived Anticancer Agents" (U01/U19 CA52956; funded by the U.S. National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD, from which several good compound leads emerged, such as betulinic acid, pervilleine A, and silvestrol. Dr. Kinghorn is currently Principal Investigator of a collaborative multidisciplinary program project entitled “Discovery of Anticancer Agents of Diverse Natural Origin” (P01 CA125066), again funded by NCI (2007-2012). The primary objective of this project is to discover new natural product anticancer agents from tropical plants, aquatic cyanobacteria, and filamentous fungi. Other research interests of Dr. Kinghorn's are on the investigation of botanical dietary supplements and edible plants for their potential cancer chemopreventive principles, the search for new sweeteners and taste-modifying agents from plants, and the investigation of plant principles for the treatment of tropical infectious diseases.